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Ornament, Crime, Myth, and Meaning: Christopher
Ornament, Crime, Myth, and Meaning: Christopher
Among Adolf Loos's writings, his famed poleinic "Ornament und Verbrechen" (Ornament and Crime) holds a special place. Not only is it the most widely cited and discussed
ofLoos's many published works, but it is also often regarded
as the defining text of Loos's ideology. the requisite clue for
unraveling his idiosyncratic approach to building and design. Yet in Inany ways "Ornament and Crime" remains one
of the least well understood of all of the early twentiethcentury programs and manifestoes. Its origins have been
surprisingly little studied, and Loos's intentions and the
broader meanings of the essay have been consistently tnisunderstood and misrepresented.
In his article on Loos in the Macmillarz Encyclopedia of
Architects, Carter Wiseman succinctly summed up the conventional view of "Ornament and Crime":
In his writing, Loos came increasingly to focus on what
he regarded as the excesses of decoration in both
traditional Viennese design and in the more recent
products of the Vienna Secession and the Wiener
Werkstatte. Loos expressed his irritation most strongly
in "Ornament and Crime," a short essay published in
1908 that flew in the face of contemporary practice. .
. . The essay caused a furor and was widely circulated
abroad. (Le Corbusier referred to it as "an Homeric
cleansing of architecture"). It rapidly became a key
document in the modernist literature.'
This same set of "facts," has been consistently reproducedwith remarkably little variation-in virtually every account
of "Ornament and Crime" since the 1930s. But if one
carefully reexamines the circulnstances surrounding the
essay's writing and publication and the wider context in
which it appeared, a different picture emerges. Indeed, on
closer inspection nearly every element of this standard view
proves to be either untrue or, at the very least, misleading.
Among the most persistent myths about the essay has to
do with when Loos actually wrote it. Almost all of the
accounts that have appeared in the past sixty years give 1908
as the date of composit~on,'and a considerable number of
authors also assert that the essay was published the same
ornamental Jugendstil language violated tradition and detracted from the more important functional aspects of building.Ix Joseph August Lux, writing in 1907, similarly cautioned against the use ofornament that was merely "applied"
and had no "organic" connection with the larger whole. l 9
And by 1908-1909 a number of other architects and critics,
including WilhelmMichel, Otto Scheffers, Richard Schaukal.
and Otto Schulze-Eberfeld, were openly questioning what
role ornament should have in modern architecture.1 But no
one, aside from Schaukal, took the step of issuing a wholesale condemnation of ornament. And Schaukal, at the end of
his essay, readily acknowledges that it was Loos who had
first made the call for the abolition of "arbitrary" (willkiirlich)
orna~nent.~'
Loos, moreover, had long been on record in his
opposition to "superfluous" ornament-as Kulka notes extending all the way back to 1897-and a wide range of
writers prior to 1908 had made note of Loos's anti-ornament
ideas.22It thus seems unlikely that Loos would have deliberately moved the date of composition back a mere 18 to 24
months, as Rukschcio has asserted. More likely, he was
simply mistaken about the date, as he was with dates on a
number of other occasions in his writings.
Loos's (and for that matter Kulka's) confusion is more
readily understandable when one examines "Ornament and
Crime" in the context of Loos's other writings of the period.
Loos's equation of the trend toward "ornamentlosigkeit"
with cultural development runs through many of his essays
of the years after 1906, and a number of the phrases and
images he employs in "Ornament and Crime" appear in both
his previous and subsequent writings. His essay "Die
iiberfliissigen" (The superfluous ones), for example, written
and published in 1908, clearly presages his later essay. Loos
writes:
The decoration of objects of daily use is the beginning
of art. The Papuan covers all of his household objects
with ornament. The history of mankind shows us how
art seeks to free itself from the profane by ernancipating itself from the object of daily use, from industrial
produ~tion.~~
Comparable phrases and ideas also appear in
Wohnungswanderungen (Residential walking-tours),which
he published privately in 1907.24Loos writes, for example,
that "the evolution of mankind goes hand in hand with the
reinoval of ornament from utilitarian ~bjects"~'-a fonnulation which is almost identical to one of the central lines in
"Ornament and Crime:" "The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal ofornament from utilitarian objects."
Another passage reads: "For the cultivated man, an untattooed
face is more beautiful than a tattooed one, even if the tattoo
is designed by Kolo Moser himself."26
Loos also had employed Inany of the images and ideas in
"Ornament and Crime'-including the primitive Papuan,
degeneracy, and tattooing-for years in his frequent talks
and ilnpromptu coffee house lectures, and they were widely
known and cited in articles about Loos in the years prior to
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NOTES
Carter Wiseman, "Adolf Loos," in Adolf K. Placzek. ed.,
Macnzillar~ Encvclopedia of Architects (London: The Free
Press, 1982), vol. 3, 3 1.
One rather notable exception is the article on Loos that appeared in Wasmuths Lexikon der Baukunst, edited by Leo Adler
(Berlin: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth), vol. 3, 546, which asserts that
the essay was written in 1907.
' See Burkhardt Rukschcio, "Ornanient und Mythos," in Alfred
Pfabigan, ed., Ornanzent u t ~ dAskese im Zeitge~stdes Wierz der
.Jahrhundertwetide (Vienna: Verlag Christian Brandstatter,
1985): 57-68.
I
?'
24
25
2h
27
28
2y
3n
'2
2nd. ed. (Salzburg and Vienna: Residenz Verlag, 1982), 16368. 460-69.
Robert ~ r l e y ,"Jahresbilanz," Jahrbuch der Cesellschaft
Osterreichiscl~erArckitekten, Vereinsjahr 1909/10 (Vienna,
1910), 87ff.
' T z e c h and Mistelbauer, Das Loos/lnus, 18ff.
"Ornament und Verbrechen," Fremden-Blatt, 22 January 1910.
3h See the advertisement in Der Sturm I: l (3 March 191O), 8.
37 M.[?], "Der Ornamentenfeind," Ulk: Wochenbeilage zum Berliner Tagblatt, 18 March 1910. Loos, not to be outdone,
responded in a short piece that appeared in Der Sturm, remarking acidly that "there would come a time when jail cells
designed by court wallpaperer Schultze or Professor Van de
Velde would be considered as cruel and unusual punishment
(strafverschatfung). Loos, "Ornament und Verbrechen,"Der
Sturm 1 : 6 (7 April 1910). 44.
'"Ludwig Steiner?], "Vortrag Adolf Loos," Prager Tagblatt, 18
March 191 1, 9, reprinted in Adolf Opel, ed., Kontroversen:
Adolj"Loos itn SpiegelderZeitgenossen (Vienna: Georg Prachner
Verlag, 1985), 47-48. See also Vladimir Slapeta, "Adolf Loos'
Vortrage in Prag und Briinn," in Burkhardt Rukschcio, ed.,
AdolfLoos, exh, cat. (Vienna: GraphischeSamrnlung Albertina,
1989), 41 -42.
l9 Loos presented it as a talk entitled " ~ b e rArchitektur" (On
architecture) at the Architektenhaus in Berlin on 8 December
1910. A small section of the essay (with minor variations from
the later version published in Trotzdem ) was reprinted in Der
Sturm. See Loos, "Uber Architektur," DerSturm 1 (15 December 1910), 334.
" See Harry F. Mallgrave, "Adolf Loos and the Ornament of
Sentiment," Midgdrd 1 (1987): 79-87.
4 ' "In seinen Schriften und den verhaltnismassig wenigen
ausgefiihrten Bauten setzte sich Loos bereits seit 1897 f i r eine
reine Sachlichkeit in der Baukunst ein unter grundsatzlicher
Ablehnung allerornamentik." Wastnuths Lexikon derBaukunst,
vol. 3, 546.
42 Walter Curt Behrendt, Modern Building: Its Nature, Problems.
and Forms (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937),
96-97.
"lch habe aber damit niemals gemeint, was die puristen ad
aburdum getrieben haben, dass das Ornament systematisch und
konsequent abzuschaffen sei. Nur da, w o e s einmal
zeitnotwendig verschwunden ist, kann man es nicht wieder
anbringen." Loos, "Ornament und Erziehung," Nus srner (1 0
October 1924), reprinted in Trotzdem, 177.
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